exchemist

What strikes me as absurd is the idea that government is some kind of separate entity with its own agenda, rather than being what people vote to get. Government doesn't have an agenda to get a bigger population so that it has more to spend. Its expenditure is essentially per capita. So it will need more to spend if the population is larger. If it is smaller, it needs less. Ageing is not a one-off bulge. It's a long term, irreversible change in the age distribution. I agree that if government can get the retirement age raised that will help a lot. But it is also inescapable that the coming age distribution will be more costly to support than the previous one, due to the extra permanent tranche of very elderly, infirm people.

You are not taking into account the age distribution. The problem many countries face - and will do increasingly - is a growing cohort of the old, who are now living to very advanced age, needing increasingly costly medical care and other support, while the working age portion of the population shrinks, because the birth rate is insufficient to replenish it. We no longer drop dead at 70 from a lifetime of smoking. That's a problem. Solutions may involve further raising of the retirement age, on the basis that older people are in better health than they were when retirements ages were originally set. But that is hard to do (cf. strikes over it in France, currently) and may not be a complete solution. (Your comments about governments liking more money to spend are absurd, by the way. Governments in democracies are elected and it is the people that elect them that are constantly demanding they spend money, to provide an increasing range of services to society.)

Are you trying to be obtuse? These reservoirs are just concepts denoting a heat source and a heat sink, whose temperatures remains constant irrespective of whether heat is drawn from or given to them They are nothing to do with any "environment". Just a heat input at one temperature and a heat output at another. That's it. Doesn't matter from where, or to where. The concept of a cycle is specifically intended to represent the working processes of a theoretical, idealised heat engine, containing a fixed amount of an ideal gas, which goes through a cycle of expansion and contraction and does work in the process, all according to the gas laws. So it's not a real engine (of course) but a distillation, to its essentials, of the simplest imaginable heat engine: a gas, alternately expanded and contracted and pushing a piston, and the heat flows involved in that. As it turns out, the efficiency formula that results is beautifully simple, as you have realised, and only depends on the input and output temperatures. But it is a formula for a heat engine: the most efficient one that is possible to imagine.

That's ballocks. It is an ideal theoretical engine cycle, with constant temperature heat input and output. The environment has nothing to do with it.

Don't be ridiculous. This is a total ranting rhetorical muddle as usual and contains a stupid straw man. There is no such thing as a "Carnot engine". You have made that up. There is a Carnot cycle, which, as several people have told you several times, is a theoretical optimum heat engine cycle whose thermal efficiency, according to the theory of thermodynamics, no real engine can exceed. The theory of the Carnot cycle would thus obviously be falsified if someone were to produce a heat engine exceeding Carnot cycle efficiency. So it is - obviously- a falsifiable theory, in Popper's terms.

What point do you wish to discuss? Answering a question nobody has asked is a very odd way to start a discussion. Or are you just a bot?

You've been on this kick for almost a decade now.

Bingo! The Galileo gambit. Well, it was only a matter of time.😄

That's why I put particles in inverted commas. The whole idea of a particle is a rather ridiculous one, when you think about it: a notional ideal object, with no dimensions but nevertheless a host of other properties.

You just need to ask yourself what is meant by "touch". Subatomic so-called "particles" are not like little steel balls. When one says that two object touch, what we mean is that they are close enough for the atoms on their surfaces to repel one another strongly if they are pushed closer together. That is what "touching" means.

Yes, I knew vaguely that caloric was supposed to be a sort of nebulous fluid, but I never studied the history of science formally so never had any reason to think much about it. I grouped it mentally with phlogiston and the aether as one of those many dead ends in the development of science. But now I can see what a good (though still wrong) idea it was, and how illuminating it was to people at that time. Anyway, that's the chief thing I get from these threads started by cranks. There was an excellent one last year about IR and climate change, which alerted me to a c.19th Irish experimenter by the name of John Tyndall, who basically built the first IR spectrometer without realising it!

References to being shut down or banned, men in black (in your previous thread) and so forth. In the latest post it is this passage: " I already had other threads here that were abruptly closed, then reprimanded and banned for simply "bringing up" the same. I guess I'm doing it again, just mentioning I have a YouTube channel, apparently. So damned if I do and damned if I don't (present my own evidence or theories anywhere in this forum)." Unlike normal people, who just get on with discussing the science, you whine about moderation policy, casting yourself in the role of victim. Give us all a break from that. I'm far more interested in your wrong-headed arguments, especially when they get me to explore bits of the history of science that are unfamiliar to me. 😀

Aha. Thanks. So it's basically the riposte one gives to some fool of a creationist intoning, in a singsong voice, that "order cannot come from disorder". 😄 I'm not sure that calling it a "two step" is a very helpful label, but the idea is simple enough, certainly.

Hmm. One of the more annoying features of your posting style is the way your evident paranoia occasionally breaks through. I'd cut that out if I were you. And I'm afraid you are rather like a cracked record, going over and over the same ground in different ways, without apparently showing the slightest intention of listening to what you are told and learning. So the threads don't really advance much and it is hardly surprising if at some point they get closed down. You become a bore, in essence. What I do find interesting in your threads though, is the incidental detail, as is often the way with crank threads. I loved your ice engine, especially the insight I eventually got that it was really just like the early "atmospheric" steam engines (work done on the stroke in which latent heat is removed). In the present case, the little excursion into the history of caloric and the realisation that thinking of heat as a fluid, flowing from high to low temperature and thereby doing work, was behind Carnot's ideas, was a new insight for me.

Aha, so it's translated from Russian, then? Very illuminating.

No idea. Can you give some context, please?

I am no biologist but I don't think plants can get nutrition from proteins in milk or yogurt, saccharides in the starch in flour or sugars in orange juice, or triglyceride fats in cooking oil. These are all, so far as I know, types of substance they synthesise for themselves. They will take up water and minerals from the soil, but I think that's all. However, there are plenty of bacteria and fungi that can make use of some of these types of substance.

Yes you are quite right. Your diagram represents the Carnot cycle efficiency formula in the the form η=(TH - TL) / TH . The length of the line from absolute zero to TH is 100% and, using the temperatures you have chosen, the length of it to TL is 80%. That's all it is. However what I think some other posters have been trying to do is explain how that very simple formula for the maximum possible efficiency is derived. That too is fairly simple, but it does require you to understand the gas laws and what an isothermal and an adiabatic process are. The Carnot cycle simply applies these to a fixed amount of gas doing work by expanding against a piston and then being cooled so that it can repeat the cycle and do more work. So if the gas laws are true, the Carnot efficiency formula is true. More detail here: http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/thermo/carnot.html

But important to keep in mind that alcohols are a whole family of organic substances, in which there is a hydrocarbon backbone and one or more hydroxyl groups (-OH) attached. There is only one of these that can be drunk safely (within modest limits), namely ethanol, C2H5OH, as @chenbeier says. All the others are poisonous. Commercial sprits are usually 40% ethanol, the rest being water. Wine is about 13% and beer 4-5%.

I'm surprised you were not also Nebuchadnezzar and Rameses II. Funny how these reincarnation nuts are never reincarnations of ordinary people.

And for 150 years, all engine designers have been failing to apply common sense, in your expert opinion, based on some half-arsed experiments you've done with a $200 toy Stirling engine? Stroll on! 😁

Assuming "revenge" = "continent", I am not aware we know of any other planets with plate tectonics. Without that, the whole idea of continents becomes fairly meaningless. Continents are lighter portions of lithosphere that float on a denser layer. They seem to arise by a process of fractionation, due to volcanic activity. So if those elements are not present, you won't expect there to be identifiable blocks of crust that you could call continents.

Wrong. Industrial diesel engines (low speed, two stroke, with an energy recovery turbine in the exhaust) can get over 50% efficiency, and combined cycle turbine installations even getting on for 60%: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_cycle_power_plant The opening few paragraphs go into this a bit and even refer to how close to Carnot cycle efficiency they can get.

They know the temperature of combustion inside their machines. They have to, to choose the right alloys, calculate expansion, estimate expected NOx generation for emissions compliance, and all manner of other things. You have no conception of how much detailed work goes into the design of an industrial engine or turbine. A power turbine does not put out exhaust below ambient, obviously. You are, as you so often do, introducing irrelevant anecdotes to muddy the discussion. You can get obviously get Joule-Thomson cooling by expansion from the outlet of a compressed air supply. But we are not, I say again NOT going to get distracted by that latest irrelevance of yours. What are you doing here, Tom?

Do you really think the designers of heat engines don't measure their efficiency? I spent the last decade of my career talking to designers of engines and turbines for ships and power plants. I can assure you that the fuel efficiency of their machines was one of their top preoccupations, and that comes down to thermal efficiency, which was often quoted. Every power plant operator knows the efficiency of their generation plant. It is absolutely central to their business. Unlike you, they were not just futzing about with hair dryers. 😁